Day 5001 of people not doing what I want

A second serving, 275g, of turkey and rice soup. Its appearance, with a lot of broth, made me think of the scene from one of the films about Oliver Twist where he asks for more food.

I saw the film when I was young and don't remember much; "you've got to pick a pocket or two", a song with chanting of "Oliver", and that line. My siblings and I might have facetiously used the same words to ask for more food at mealtimes.

I'm sure that I did not notice when I was young how the female in the scene restrains the male from reprimanding Oliver before he approaches, and how the body language of the male when he takes Oliver to see the people with power over the orphanage shows that he wants the kids to be able to have more food.

Mentioned Spain in a recent post. This survey is not precisely about the same issue; it doesn't mention immigrants:

Would you rather get money from your parents or earn your own money?

but many of the young people in Spain who can't get jobs, presumably due to fierce competition for jobs (or for well-paying jobs, if they don't apply for jobs with low wages), do get money from their parents. If they don't ask for policy changes that create jobs, like Oliver asked for more food, their parents might think they are fine with just getting money for free. And the same at a global scale.

Delete

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2047329305714401478 seahorse emoji, food pyramid, salt in diet. Dangers of deciding "this thing can't be trusted" without the ability to provide feedback to correct a situation that other people might misinterpret.

Day 5000 of people not doing what I want

My mum is watching a film which an AI query for "british film about a young girl who is abused and forced into prostitution" identifies as No Child of Mine (1997).

I identified the issue in the post, "A Message to No One", as "activities that are seen as unethical, like sex work and finance, being paid at a higher rate." I also mentioned it in this argument as "child abuse".

Finance being seen as unethical? Kate may or may not remember me; on her old Chirp Club account, which she apparently lost access to, she retweeted this status from Elon Musk:

u can’t sell houses u don’t own
u can’t sell cars u don’t own
but
u *can* sell stock u don’t own!?
this is bs – shorting is a scam
legal only for vestigial reasons

After I ran out of money when I was living outside and was about to stop, I said in an email to Mei and Kate that I would probably get a job in software development or finance. I did not. I also said that I would probably never contact them again. Whether this came to pass might be debatable; I sent more emails about the idea to everyone in my contacts that included both of them as recipients, but I have not sent another email to Kate since then (~September 2012) that was not also to everyone else in my contacts, or 50~100 people. I sent one or two to the email address I had for Mei, but they returned an error indicating the account had been closed. This was after Mei had apparently closed the other email account she had in late Dec 2011, possibly because I had accidentally sent an email to her other account after she replied to me for the first time since mid-2009.

So anyway. I definitely found some amusement in grouping finance with sex work. But if it's a problem that these activities receive higher pay, does that mean the price will go down and everyone will be able to afford it?

Some clarification: a high price is a problem because it encourages people to do it. If the 'price' is no higher than other activities, people have no special reason to do it, but the 'price' includes the risk of punishment. The reward for robbing a jewelry store is not high because the price is high, even if it's a crime that can be carried out using only a hammer. (That's a video I remember finding so funny that it was hard to continue watching due to laughter, when I first watched and downloaded it on 25 May 2012.)

Speaking your mind, why do you find them wrong?

There are times when I don't try to explain someone's actions, because they are acting stupid. Someone who tries to understand the story of this idea not being used might have difficulty understanding these parts of it.

For example: "Why economists are wrong". I said they only want to make the numbers go up. 'The numbers' is best interpreted in this case as GDP. If this idea reduces unemployment, why would it not raise GDP? Because I think the method for calculating GDP incorrectly takes into account higher qualities of goods, such that lower inequality would lead to a lower GDP, because people might purchase the same quantity of a high quality of a good but its price would go down.

When inequality only goes up, as it has in the US since ~1980, this error in the GDP calculation just means that measured GDP growth is a bit higher every year. Few people in the US would complain about that; people like to boast that the US has the highest nominal GDP, though it fell behind China in purchasing power parity GDP in 2014.

I don't think most economists would be aware of this error, if I am right that it exists (and it might be wrong). So if an economist did not think this would happen, then I was giving them more credit than they deserved, making them out to be smarter than they are.

If I did something stupid that had serious consequences, I would want other people to point it out. But I am in no danger of being seen as less smart than average, for anyone who knows something about me (a random person, like a police officer, might still make this mistake). Other people might consider themselves to have this risk, so they would not want people to point out stupid things that they do.

Pey has a memory of when she was playing original World of Warcraft on her older brother's account, ~20 years ago when she was like 12 years old, and she did something that made another player ask her, "are you stupid or something?" (I never shared the idea with Pey.)

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/FamedCelebrity/status/2046526221245382871

Links to Spain throws open its doors to undocumented migrants: Huge queues continue to form after socialist government granted residency to 500,000 people

(I use Firefox's Reader mode, the page icon on the right side of the URL bar, to avoid the signup banner, or equivalently prepending 'about:reader?url=' to the URL.)

From that article I also saw Louisiana dad executed his seven children and nephew in rage after wife discovered his disgusting betrayal, relatives say

The article say it's "one of the deadliest family massacres in American history", otherwise I wouldn't mention it. Timeline:

2012: Snow and Elkins, aged ~17, start a relationship. Youth unemployment at 16%, Unemployment Level/Job Openings: Total Nonfarm is around 3.3.

2013: Elkins, aged ~18, joins the National Guard as a Signal Support System Specialist and a Fire Support Specialist.

2015: Their relationship ends (aged ~20).

2016: Baby drama and legal conflicts over paternity (Snow and Elkins are ~21 years old).

~2019: Shaneiqua Pugh's first baby.

~2021: Christina Snow's third baby (Snow and Elkins are ~26 years old).

The timeline on the day of the deaths is a bit confused: did he Elkins kill his children, then go to the other property and shoot Snow, and then return to the first property to shoot Pugh?

Despite not knowing this, I conclude that Elkins killed his children because he was convinced by his wife's actions that he was a bad person, and he thought the world would be better off without anyone who was similar to him. He was killed by police, instead of killing himself, because he didn't want other people to think that this was his motivation, which a few more people might have thought if he had killed himself, although in both cases most people would just think that he was a bad person who wanted to cause harm to others.

Compare 2022 Nong Bua Lamphu massacre where most people who died were not related to the perpetrator: someone who criticized the way other people acted and wanted to harm them, by killing the ones they cared about most. 2024 Zhuhai car attack: "Police say he was upset about his divorce", which I interpret as being at least partly about his wife's actions. "Most of the victims were middle-aged or elderly people in exercise groups", and the fact is (look at people ignoring Covid-19) that people care less about old people dying than young people dying, and yet the the perpetrator chose to attack old people instead of young people at a school.

To summarize, Elkins: "I am bad."

Nong Bua Lamphu massacre: "Society is bad."

2024 Zhuhai car attack: "My wife is bad."

The solution to any problem could be said to be for people to not be bad. People might disagree with the 'blame' in the last two cases, but few would disagree that Elkins was bad. So, how to prevent someone like Elkins from being bad? Exercise for the reader.

 

First article, Spain's immigrants. Someone in the replies on Chirp Club mentions youth unemployment, but few people ever think of linking data. Without data, people can just say, "well maybe this person is wrong" and move on to the next tweet, 0.5 seconds later.

25% youth unemployment in 2025 is certainly much better than 55% in 2013. The latest figure for the US is 8.5%; recent peaks were 19.5% in Apr 2010 and the brief Covid-19 lockdown spike of 27.5% in 2020, which lasted a couple months. So for about 14 years, Spain had worse youth unemployment than the highest level the US reached during its lockdowns for the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

So how can Spain's Prime Minister get away with the following?

Sanchez described the drive in a letter addressed to citizens published on Tuesday on X as not only an act of justice but also an economic necessity.

'Spain is ageing... Without more people working and contributing to the economy, our prosperity slows, and our public services suffer,' he wrote.

[...]

But with about 90 per cent of new jobs going to immigrants, income per person has barely grown in Spain.

Because applicants need to show a clean criminal record, so the government can claim that crime won't increase from the policy, and it's like having more slaves. The poor are harmed: people who compete with immigrants for jobs. The rich may seem to benefit, as they become richer while prices for many things do not increase.

Economists sometimes try to show that inequality causes harm to a society, with worse outcomes on many measured metrics. I won't bother to look any of that up. If you filter out crime, few negative outcomes remain.

The question then becomes, what kind of society do you want to have? It's no longer a simple matter of "everyone would prefer it this way." There are people who seem to want inequality, even if it comes with effects like "the majority of voters think that job creation is more important than dealing with climate change", and others who think that inequality is a bad outcome. It makes the future uncertain and subject to the influence of individual people who decide that one outcome is better. I don't want to say "take a side", because it implies that one thing, like inequality, is the only important topic: in reality, people may disagree on one thing, but agree on many other things, so no one is really on the opposite side from someone else.

Spain fertility rate: 1.12 births per woman (2023).

Countering misinformation

"You use the little boys' room. I use the large, strong, adult males' room."

1) Collect nationwide statistics on the profit each company makes per employee. 2) Require news stories that discuss the profitability of a company, such as whether it can afford to pay workers more, to report on how that company compares to similar companies on profit per employee. For example, "in the bottom 10% in profit per employee."

Rested Experience

Was thinking while I was sleeping about rested experience, the system in World of Warcraft on which this idea is based. For those who don't know, the story goes like this: the developers wanted to discourage people from playing too long. They added a penalty for killing a lot of mobs. People really disliked it. So the developers changed it from a penalty for killing a lot of mobs, to a bonus for killing smaller numbers of mobs, after reducing the base XP from mobs. According to developer descriptions of the change, it was the exact same system, but presented in a different way. (It would not be the exact same system if the original penalty was based off of time played, not number of mobs killed; I don't know if this was the case.)

In the system in WoW as it launched, rested experience is accrued by being in a safe area, an inn or a capital city, including while a character is offline. Going from normal (no bonus) to rested (bonus) from being in an inn is the same as going from tired (penalty) to normal (no penalty), so it's plausible the original mechanics could have been the same, other than the different baseline.

So why did players hate it so much? Because it was clearly an additional system; you didn't interact with it in your first moments in the game, just later on. If the system was removed, would players benefit? In the original system, players would benefit it it was removed; with the 'new' system, rephrased as a benefit with no actual gameplay changes, players perceived that they would be harmed if the system were removed.

What if this idea was described in the same way? "A bonus for lower amounts of work; all work after that is normal pay." This seems dishonest. Many businesses cannot afford to just pay everyone more; if they did, they would go out of business. Grocery stores are often said to have very thin profit margins, like 1%.

If you say, "work after X hours is paid at a reduced rate", then people feel like they're being discouraged from working. And that's the point. People should feel like they wouldn't want to work if they only get 0.7x the normal rate, just as they should feel like they don't want to work if they get 0x the normal rate (aka salary).

In Why overtime is bad, I described two ways of calculating someone's wage rate, to give people the choice of deciding which one is 'better'. Obviously, a business would prefer the calculation that gives the lower wage rate, while an employee would prefer the higher wage rate. This argument was not successful.

Instead, add a single line to the description: "Increase base wage rate so that total wages are unchanged." For anyone working less than 40 hours per week, it would take a decrease in the base wage rate for total wages to be unchanged: people who are bad at math might not realize this. But the objective, to avoid changing total wages, is easy to understand and clearly stated.

Is 'undertime' a stupid name for extra pay for early hours? I don't know. The system is also supposed to be something that can work off of hours worked per year for an employer (like seasonal agricultural workers), not just hours worked per week, and connecting it too strongly to the overtime system through its name might be bad.

The flaw with the original concept of 'tired XP' was that people saw that they were harmed by the existence of the system. Adding "Increase base wage rate so that total wages are unchanged" to the description avoids this perception, for this idea.

___

Update 20 Apr 2026, 11:13

Somehow I never realized this before: in World of Warcraft, it was not the exact same system, just presented in a different way. A new character does not start with any 'rested XP', which is when the experience bar at the bottom of the screen turns blue instead of purple and mobs give double XP. So the change from 'tired XP' to 'rested XP' made the early game harder (unless the experience required to level was also reduced, but that would also affect quest XP etc.). The change in baseline, of halving XP from mobs, was a real change in difficulty that made leveling with 'rested XP' twice as hard as leveling with 'tired XP' had been, and people still liked it.

Hungry ghost

A few hours ago, I wanted to make a post about this quote, which I recorded in a text file as follows:

戰爭無情，和平無價
War is ruthless; peace is priceless.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210613113511/https://www.ydn.com.tw/news/newsInsidePage?chapterID=1312831

via https://forum.skalman.nu/viewtopic.php?t=50050

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新北八二三臺海戰役紀念碑

https://www.kinmen.gov.tw/News_Content2.aspx?n=98E3CA7358C89100&sms=BF7D6D478B935644&s=E28F9203506FEBAE

金門新聞(轉載金門日報)
戰爭無情和平無價

About the quote, and about the subject of the first article where I first saw it mentioned. Since the same quote is on a monument that doesn't mention the soldier in the first article, he was probably not the originator of the quote. It talks about him striving to teach his family to act in good ways; basically, to be nice.

Explorations of iterated prisoner's dilemmas show that the optimal strategy often depends on other existing strategies. A given strategy can be successful in one environment, causing it to increase in frequency, while failing in another. Being 'nice' is a strategy that can fail if everyone else is 'mean', partly because if too many people are mean, the cost of trying to keep track of or punish everyone who is mean is too hard. But there is also the consideration of people simply punishing anyone who deviates from what is thought of as the optimal strategy. Look at the discourse around males being nice towards females in the US: males who do this can be subjected to disparaging terms like "simp", or the somewhat less disparaging term "white knight". Wiktionary says,

3. (figurative, derogatory) Someone who unnecessarily defends someone else.

    1. (informal, derogatory, Internet) A man who defends a woman in debate etc. in an attempt to gain her favour.

    Synonyms: doormat, simp

Urban dictionary also has definitions but for some reason the upvotes and downvotes aren't showing up for me, so I don't know which one people think is the best. One entry:

1) A man who stands up for a womens right to be an absolute equal, but then steps up like a white knight to rescue her any time that equality becomes a burden.

2) A man who Promotes gender equality but practices special privilege for women.

Compare the female in China who bought a house paid for the down payment on a house with the money she got from selling the 20 iPhones that males sent her.

"I can't even find one boyfriend. She can actually find 20 boyfriends at the same time and even get them to buy her an iPhone 7. Just want to ask her to teach me such skills."

So anyway, I just mentioned it for that quote: "War is ruthless; peace is priceless". Note that the original Chinese uses 無, "not", for both parts: "without feelings", and "without price".

The US also treated people terribly during the war in Vietnam. A search for "site:wikipedia.org us vietnam war special forces operations that killed civilians" turns up Tiger Force ("investigations during the course of the war and decades afterwards revealed the unit had committed extensive war crimes against hundreds of Vietnamese civilians") and Phoenix Program. It also turns up Civilian Irregular Defense Group program. The article says (noting that the content in a Wikipedia article is subject to change, and it might sometimes be necessary to check an article's history for its content on the date it was referenced),

Furthermore, he felt that Green Berets members "viewed themselves as something separate and distinct from the rest of the military effort," describing them as "fugitives from responsibility" who "tended to be nonconformist, couldn't quite get along in a straight military system, and found a haven where their actions were not scrutinized too carefully, and where they came under only sporadic or intermittent observation from the regular chain of command."

which seems relevant to the film Apocalypse Now (1979). I'm not praising the film, and it doesn't seem to feature any Green Berets, but there are certainly characters in it that don't act like typical soldiers.

But I mentioned that last article just because I watched most of the film Gran Torino a couple weeks ago. It features Hmong people, with one of them saying that Hmong people are in the US because they helped the south and the US during the war, so they had to leave when they lost.

So: the US might not have done anything during the Iraq war and occupation that was as bad as what Israel has recently done, but it did during the Vietnam War. (Also, shooting at civilian cars that drove too close to military vehicles during Iraq's occupation was bad.) And the US also killed lots of people. As the saying goes.

Lots of people also died in Syrian prisons. Many of them starved to death, rather than being deliberately killed. Maybe the Syrian government simply could not afford to buy food for all of the prisoners during the fighting; Syria spent $2.2 billion on military in 2011, the year the civil war started (population was 23 million), while Israel spent $13 billion on military in the same year (population was 7.8 million, about the population of Wuhan Nanjing in China).

Why doesn't Israel kill people after torturing them, or let them starve? Because the purpose is not genocide. The guards who are mean to Palestinian prisoners are trying to make them think that their situation is bad; that they should not be happy when Gaza has a GDP of $161 per capita or $200 per capita ("a level associated with the poorest low-income countries, and a full 95 percent below the West Bank’s").

If people in Gaza were not happy, they would try harder to fix their situation. (Like, if they were less happy, they might share this idea if they learned of it.) Do people have children when they are not happy?

When people spread information about the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, they are trying to cause an improvement of those people's treatment. But are they trying to end war?

"War is ruthless; peace is priceless."

As always, I spent too long on parts of this post, like finding a reference for Syria's military spending. Started this post over two hours ago.

 

(The following is something I eventually wrote after waiting long enough, instead of just publishing the above.)

I think I also wanted to mention a video? If A Combat Veteran Was A 911 Dispatcher - YouTube

Basically, "shoot the intruder." About 13 years ago, my oldest brother (currently in prison) mentioned a book that I think was On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. After he mentioned the book, I read what was probably the Wikipedia article about it, and said that my response was based on this and that I didn't think the book was worth reading; he seemed to imply he disagreed with my dismissal of it. We discussed the topic as recently as five years ago, when he helped my mum with a drive to a new state (since I couldn't help, lacking a driver's license). I mentioned a battle on a Pacific island where Japanese soldiers came very close to US lines (probably Marines) and expressed skepticism towards the view that a soldier would not shoot someone charging at them with fixed bayonet. In fact, just a couple years ago, shortly before he went to prison, I questioned him on whether the Ukraine conflict had changed his views about the issue.

It seemed to me that his belief that most people would not be willing to kill each other without intense training that overrides human instinct or something was not based on evidence. For example, my oldest brother considers himself to be religious, unlike me. I think he believes that what is commonly called heaven is important. I think that belief in heaven is not based on evidence, and that it is not controversial to say that it is not based on evidence: that religions embrace the lack of evidence for various claims as a positive aspect of religion, rather than taking the position that the lack of what could be called scientific evidence for miracles is a flaw. And so I found it plausible that my oldest brother's views on people's willingness to kill could avoid a thorough and impartial examination of the evidence.

For example, I said regarding the first petition, in 2012, that this was a conversation about whether people were, by nature, good or evil. If people can be convinced to kill other people easily (the question of whether the four people in The Push were convinced to kill someone 'easily' aside), one might say that this would mean people are, by nature, evil. If my brother thought this, he might have thought that it would be more beneficial to anyone for them to think that most people would not kill another human without training to 'dehumanize' an enemy, even if this is false.

I might actually have the opposite position: as a way of making people believe in justice, i.e. punishment for deliberately defecting in a prisoner's dilemma, it's better for society if people think that other people are willing to kill someone when the circumstances call for it.

I tend to believe it's beneficial for an individual to believe things that are true, even though this is not always the case: if I didn't believe this idea would fix problems, I would not be poor right now. Basically, I view the question of whether people are good or evil to be unimportant. Other people think it's important. But, like, suppose that someone wanted to determine whether I was good or bad. Sherine said in 2013 that she wasn't sure if she wanted to throw me under a bus or save me from being thrown under a bus. If a person who wanted know whether I was good or bad has not yet concluded that I'm bad, it doesn't mean that I'm not bad: it could just mean that I am smart enough to act in a way that will appear good to other people, and that I am using like Stanislavski's system to act as a good person. (The 'broken mask' in 【GUMIオリジナル】 正義粉砕 【NfN】, but the concept also relates to the whole "are you happy if someone thinks you are?" question.)

I occasionally think about this: a stupid person who attempts to lie will often make mistakes. So even if you trust them at one point, eventually they will probably make a mistake, and at that point get punished. So trusting them might sort of seem fine. Or, a stupid person who tries to determine if other people are lying will often make mistakes in their conclusions, both false positives and false negatives: the cost of making this determination is higher than for a smart person to make the determination. Rather than looking for 'clues', it could be better to rely on reputation, including enforcing changes of reputation based on new evidence.

Also, I was thinking recently: "could a smart AI take over the world?" I recently saw in my bookmarks a video with a title that starts with "Google smokes Olympic mathletes", presumably a progression in the trend that has included "AI does better than 90% of people on college-level exams". But can a smart AI convince people that it's stupid? Can it both convince people that it's stupid and also have agency? Would people let a dumb AI have any power? Would they let a smart AI have any power? Smart people accomplishing things because they look dumb is apparently a thing; I linked a "Columbo solves the Death Note case" video last year, though I think my favorite was [95k views, 4.9k subs, 10 Dec 2025]Love Note: A Death Note Parody - Episode 1 - YouTube. If stupid people support people who have the best interests of stupid people in mind, how could a smart AI convince people that it has this goal, instead of the goal of helping smart people?

Back to the question of Violence. Underestimating other people's potential for violence can have obvious negative consequences. What about overestimating their potential for violence? In 2020, there was some kind of family event I went to. Maybe some relatives were in town, maybe for the death of my last grandparent. I remember asking my youngest sister, regarding Covid-19, whether the family gathering at a restaurant was worth a 0.001% chance of death (or something like that). Her response was, "I don't know."

Topic: sexually transmitted diseases. Many people seem to not care about them. Just like many people seem to not care about a small risk of death: jumping off cliffs into water, or getting into fights, or driving at a high speed on a road, or not following all safety procedures or doing sufficient calculations about loads when using heavy equipment. Note that joining the military when you could end up on a ship that is being targeted by 100 missiles is a calculated risk, in exchange for money or the promise of a protective benefit to people you care about.

So for some people, a 2% chance to die because you decided to wander around city streets at night (or visit a country where you might be kidnapped) is the same as a 1% chance: both are equally effective at deterring the activity. For other people, maybe the 1% chance is acceptable, but the 2% chance would not be, and so overestimating the potential for violence could avoid their death. Or maybe there is a systematic underestimation of the risk in specific situations, such that overestimating the potential that humans have for violence in general leads to a more accurate estimate of the risk of a particular situation, due to cancellation of errors. But systematic errors could just as easily lead to overestimation of risk in particular situations, leading to a compounded error of two overestimations.

There was that poll for teenagers on Reddit, Do you truly consider yourself to be a good person?, and I just remembered these videos, featuring the song Sweet Caroline:

Nick Davis - Jealous Boyfriend Crashes Party: A POV Story - TikTok (Tikvib) 2m likes, by @nickdavisfr

Brooke Monk - Like bruh I'm right here - TikTok (Tikvib) 959k likes, by @brookemonk_

POV: The Quiet Kid #TheManniiShow.com/series - YouTube 2.5m likes, by
@TheManniiShow

After someone with a knife tried to mug me while I was walking to my National Guard armory late at night, I never visited that area at night again. Since I never had any reason to visit it at night again, I'm not sure if I would have considered it an area with an unreasonably high risk of crime, and whether me overestimating the potential that humans have for crime would have stopped me from being outside at night the first time.

I did learn something from it: that someone would act in the way that they did, which included grabbing my backback as I ran from the public street towards the armory, meaning they entered onto the property of the armory. I interpreted it to mean that they did not consider the US military to be an institution that seemed to benefit them, or they would not have tried to rob someone who seemed to be in it. So I can say, "I learned something, so it was not a mistake." But I did also — I think shortly after I wrote the first post on this site and was trying to find somewhere to sleep — avoid someone in a public park who might have been trying to sell me drugs, as I was uncertain if they just wanted to rob me. There is a limit to how much I value new information, if it comes at a risk.

(4 hours 52 minutes to write)

Bad Apple

I am hereby announcing that as long as Greta's Instagram page suggests that there are problems in the world that she cares about that have not been fixed, then I will think that Greta is unhappy.

Also, my sometimes still juvenile sense of humor made me think while I was waking up, of asking for TTS: "Insert your CAC into this slot"

My dream involved being in the military, other soldiers throwing away a bunch of candy and me collecting it while thinking it was more than I could ever eat, passing by a couple female soldiers who were discussing obtaining one of many versions of a 'meme song' that was apparently everywhere, and my worries about whether my ID would be accepted at the cafeteria (dining facility) when it was expired. As I was passing the female soldiers while carrying a bunch of candy in my arms, I broke into a jog to save time, as I often do in real life when traveling short distances outside.

I derived considerable amusement from some of the military branches in this comedy skit saying "CAC", while others said "CAC card": [7.3m views, 25 Feb 2026]How gate guards in each branch check IDs. - YouTube

I have since then thought many more times than was necessary about how it was an example of government not caring about unfortunate interpretations. Just like how I noticed that Trump was following 69 people on Truth Social when I first checked his account.

Also, the word that I was trying to think of to describe the previous post's writings on taxes, was "abstruse".

Taxes

No taxes on overtime extra pay: overtime is the 'worker sacrifices when they work less' possibility in https://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2026/04/encouraging-people-to-work-less-in-way.html.

Criticizing people who want to raise taxes: maybe the conversation is wrong. Instead of saying the purpose of taxes is to avoid more borrowing, people could change to saying that the purpose of taxes is to destroy money that would cause inflation, by taking money from people as fairly as possible. Any conversation about taxes that avoids the topic of inflation is vulnerable to people criticizing the taxes because they don't connect the issues.

Why care about inflation at all? Any government that issues its own money could just eliminate all taxes and accept higher inflation each year. For example, the European Union could give the governments of the 21 countries of the Eurozone money each year so that they would not need to have any taxes. (I was not sure if any states of the EU did not use the Euro after the UK left, until I just looked it up. I am just using information that I learned in the process of writing that sentence.)

(One reason is the cost of making new currency. If there is 2500% inflation over the course of a century (25^(1/100)=1.033 increase per year or 3.3% inflation), so that a US quarter has the purchasing power that a penny once did, do we get rid of all coins smaller than a quarter and use quarters the way that pennies were once used? Quarters are physically much larger, and using a large coin instead of a small coin is a waste. But let's disregard this reason and say that everyone uses digital currency.)

The reason not to do this is the difficulty of determining how to fairly distribute printed money. The EU is a good example. Maybe some countries currently tax 50% of all private income, while others only tax 20%. (Search for "eu tax burden wiki list" gives Tax rates in Europe and List of countries by tax rates, which don't seem to give the overall tax rate. Best would probably be to just look at government spending as a percentage of all spending: Government expenditure, percent of GDP, List of countries by government budget#International_Monetary_Fund. Germany 49%, Norway 48%, France 57%, Ukraine 71%, Netherlands 44%, Bulgaria 37%, China 33%, southern Korea 23%, Thailand 23%, Indonesia 17%.)

So if one country taxes 60% of income (let's say $30k per person, so I don't have to type €), and another taxes 20% ($10k per person), is it fair to give one country $30k per person so they can reduce taxes to zero, while giving the second country just $10k per person?

You could say, "give every country the same money per person. They can still have taxes if they want, on top of that." Like how individual US states cannot go into debt ("Most U.S. states are required by law to balance their budgets. Vermont is the only state without a balanced-budget requirement. States cannot run fiscal deficits like the federal government. Raising debt typically requires legislative or voter approval."), so if they want to spend more, just printing money is not an option.

But this removes effort. With taxes, and no equal distribution by a money-printing bank: a country that manages to produce five times as much can afford to consume five times as much. If every country gets $100k of printed money per person per year, then a country that produces $50k in value per person per year can only consume 50% more than a country that produces $0 value per person per year.

Try to measure the value that people create, and award money based on that: countries have an incentive to lie. Make up some statistics and say that each person creates $1 million in value per year. Without taxes, rewards become disconnected from reality. With taxes, if $1 million of value is being measured, then $1 million is subject to tax.

To people who don't do much thinking, this may all seem somewhat abstract: we are not in a situation where there are no taxes. This is all about explaining why are aren't in that situation even after money stopped being supported by gold (allowing governments to print unlimited money), and why there is a need to destroy money with taxes even though everyone complains about taxes.

I just overheard a sound bite because I wasn't focused on writing, and someone was just saying that stopping commercial traffic is piracy. VENEZUELA OIL TANKERS MUCH? If Iran stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them is piracy, how is the US stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them not piracy? 

With something like this, it's important to realize that the contradiction is not noteworthy; it's just people being inconsistent and not thinking about all possibilities. Just like people who are not good at chess not seeing all the possibilities from a move and therefore not playing as good as a better player.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/InnaVishik/status/2044537696576803056

There are plenty of people who studied computer science on their own and became good at it.

These pages look like they will change in the future, to update to newer years:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm

If the only job you can get is as a Home health and personal care aide (14% of net new jobs, or 3.4 times as much as the next largest category, Software developers), it doesn't matter if you spent three years learning differential calculus from online resources.

Why do people care what college someone went to? What skilled job is in a shortage in the US that does not have countless people from poorer countries who would want to come to the US to do that job?

CMV: Large-scale unemployment is not a knowledge problem that would be fixed by everyone being more educated.

In the linked tweet, Inna Vishik said, "the structure/accountability of a college environment is crucial for learning anything challenging". The existence of self-taught CS workers is a counter example. CS has historically been a rapidly changing field: there was a joke post I read a few years ago about all the new things someone would need to know in order to do a simple web-related development task. So it can be hard for colleges to keep their curriculum relevant, and so a degree becomes less valuable as an indicator of knowledge.

Whereas math does not change. The joke with physics is that Science Makes Progress Funeral by Funeral: it changes, but slowly. So a degree will definitely be relevant, and so it's easier for employers to make the decision to disregard applications that don't come from someone with a college degree.

For other difficult things, like learning a new language, plenty of people are successful without spending most of their time in formal education.

The quoted tweet, from Dmitrii Kovanikov, is implying that people who do not learn all the free knowledge are less capable. It is not a very useful observation; someone might, at best, use it to convince themselves that it's fine to ignore problems that affect stupid people, the poll that Greta probably did not create.

Another post that makes me look dumb

I said I intended not to say anything for two weeks, no matter what Greta posted on Instagram.

About five hours ago, I set my alarm for 12:00 my local time, with the intention of not going online until then, even though this would have meant a several-hour gap in which any Stories posted by Greta on Instagram would have been deleted before I saw them.

Despite what I said, I'm posting about the Story that Greta posted four hours ago, which I assume is from a video that is not yet showing up on Picuki and I'm too lazy to click the link to view Greta's profile on Instagram.

Greta mentions the report described here:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-antisemitism/

When I was 17 I think, I learned judo at my local community college. I think it counted as an actual class, in contrast to the karate that I learned at a local gym with my aunt until the gym changed the rules so that I would have required a gym membership to continue going. I stopped taking judo once school started, as I was too busy; I might have had my first job by then, as well as doing cross-country running after school and studying for seven Advanced Placement tests and the ten subjects of Academic Decathlon.

One thing that I remember had nothing to do with traditional judo lessons: it was practice with reacting to having a gun pointed at you at close range, which might sound unrealistic to any police officer who knows how fast someone can close 3~6 meters of distance. (Also.) We actually practiced with fake or toy guns, like pushing the front of the gun up while pushing down on the person's elbow.

Anyway, one memorable lesson that I'm sure I've mentioned before: pushing someone, in order to make them situate their feet along a line in the direction of force, so that they become weak in another direction. Just the general concept of controlling someone's reactions.

Why don't people feel a sense of danger at being called anti-Russian?

What about anti-Persian? Or anti-French?

I was thinking earlier about, basically, politics. Like,

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/trump-responds-critics-after-posting-christ-like-image/

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116407007495166895

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116408742801619405

The strategy basically is, "make someone look like they are worse than average". For example, worse than the average US president. If everyone always uses this strategy, then it should work about 50% of the time. And for some people, that is an acceptable success rate: high enough that they have no interest in looking for a better use of their time. It's actually sort of like gambling: people don't know if their efforts to make someone look worse than average will succeed in any particular situation, because they try the strategy in many cases where there's a significant chance of failure, and so they get interested in the result.

In contrast: stopping global warming has had a 0% success rate up until the current time, just like all efforts to avoid dying have historically ended in failure. 50% is great compared to that.

___

Update 15 Apr 2026, 21:00

So I just had a thought. When Kanye West got banned from Chirp Club for something related to Jewish people. Suppose that Greta posted the following on Chirp Club:

1) Kill all Muslims

If banned, success. If not banned:

2) Stab all Jewish people in the arm with a Covid vaccine

If not banned, escalate the statements to approach the statement in 1, for science.

This is a strategy that can only be used by someone who is comfortable with being seen by some people as dishonest. In general, I think it's a much less interesting thing to do than sharing the idea.

* Video by 心系小许 had 510k likes on 04 Sep 2025, only up to 511.4k now. Not actually sure if the song says "Kanye West". Would have linked a more energetic performance by ク无感 @96421348752 but it's deleted or hidden on Douyin.

Post that makes me look dumb

Was just having a dream in which there was a female who was probably Turkish. I infer that I knew this in the dream because I asked her if she knew who fancyfenty was. In real life this is a nickname for Rihanna, but in the dream, the person's response was like "that tells me everything I need to know" implying that she was the previous owner of the @fancyfenty Chirp Club account. Anyway, a bit later on in the dream I remembered when in 2013, this person said something to Sherine that mentioned that Sherine was Lebanese, and I think Sherine's response was like, "thanks for remembering what country I'm from."

If those were the words that Sherine used, then I was wrong in thinking that there was ambiguity in "what country Sherine is from". I had been thinking that when I said in 2013 that "if Sherine doesn't share the idea, it means she doesn't care about Lebanon", that it was possible that it wasn't "the country Sherine was from", which I think Sherine had said was one of the only two things she cared about. Since I wasn't sure if it was possible to say that the country Sherine was from, was actually the US or Canada.

But if this response from Sherine to @fancyfenty did use these words, then I was wrong, and I should have known in 2013 that this interpretation was not possible.

Some videos featuring songs by Rihanna:

20141110 雪克杯杯 欣欣 蚊子 笨笨 南港7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love, Only Girl In The World]

01227 ( 6 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love]

01228 ( 7 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - Only Girl in the World]

5374 ( 1 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love]

5375 ( 4 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - Only Girl in the World]

No hidden message in the title

I don't know if the following statement is true, but I will assume that it's true until the evidence does not appear to support it:

If no famous person publicly shares the idea, it's because Sherine doesn't want or care if anyone shares it, even though Sherine's family is from Lebanon and Greta recently posted on Instagram about the damage to Lebanese agriculture.

I'm waiting for Greta to make the poll from the post, "I got distracted by lions".

Perceptions

Trump linked a news article: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116403452696175100

This was a trending story on the same site: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/hormuz-blockade-europe-mobilizing-against-u-s-not/

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is dependent on oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Around the globe, the U.S. is the primary enforcer of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maintaining freedom of navigation for all countries. Trump’s request for Europe and other allies to support U.S. freedom-of-navigation patrols in the Strait of Hormuz was rejected.

Someone can actually write this. From Wikipedia:

As of October 2024, 169 sovereign states and the European Union are parties. The United States is among the states that have not ratified the treaty.

I was actually thinking several days ago, "Iran should conduct freedom of navigation patrols near the US." But I don't know if they have any large warships left. And if they did have one, the US would probably just sink it during the freedom of navigation patrol.

Bullet

 (cd '/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/not sexy/'; find * -name "*journey*" -printf "%T@ a %8s  %Td %Tb %TY %TH:%TM  %p\n"|sort -n|cut -f 3- -d " " )

24534024  07 Aug 2025 16:32  武媚儿 @65464921155 via Vicky小辣椒, “沙漠之花”华莉丝•迪里的60年血泪逆袭！世界反割礼第一人。 #AI#华莉丝迪里 Life journey [douyin 7535029932062625059].mp4
18076650  07 Aug 2025 16:38  武媚儿 @65464921155 妈祖林默舍己救人的一生！#妈祖文化 #历史人物 #民间故事 #AI历史 #人物故事 Life journey [douyin 7519460644590193954].mp4
25148459  07 Aug 2025 16:39  武媚儿 @65464921155 抗倭名将，练兵有方，保家卫国，民族英雄垂青史，戚继光的一生#历史故事 #古人的智慧 #历史人物解说#人物故事 AI Life journey [douyin 7518415635631951144].mp4
21008008  07 Aug 2025 16:43  武媚儿 @65464921155 晚清脊梁 左宗棠的一生 #历史#AI#左宗棠#清朝 Life journey [douyin 7516380145176464680].mp4
20855797  07 Aug 2025 16:44  武媚儿 @65464921155 《从孤苦乞儿到冷血帝王，朱元璋的悲剧谁懂？》#历史人物解说#朱元璋#帝王 #明朝#草根 AI Life journey [douyin 7515797391547780386].mp4
24628018  07 Aug 2025 16:48  武媚儿 @65464921155 《秦良玉：从抗金到抗清，明朝最后的巾帼忠魂》#秦良玉 #历史 #明朝 #ai Life journey [douyin 7520445658902449460].mp4
17980766  07 Aug 2025 16:50  武媚儿 @65464921155 云南白药创始人 曲焕章传奇的一生#历史 #曲焕章#AI#云南白药#草药 Life journey [douyin 7523581314605272354].mp4
20928440  07 Aug 2025 17:16  武媚儿 @65464921155 晚清巨商胡雪岩，跌宕起伏的传奇人生#历史 #ai#胡雪岩 #清朝 Life journey [douyin 7522089443496316195].mp4
16737351  07 Aug 2025 17:17  武媚儿 @65464921155 18岁守寡被夺家产，只剩50两嫁妆的她，保住了吴家命脉！#周莹#清末#AI#人物故事#青年创作者成长计划 Life journey [douyin 7532478518232648994].mp4

A white, cat-shaped carrot: when the character Death in one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels looked at a cat in a smithy and saw the cat as it was at all points in its life simultaneously, including the future.

Remembering things that were never seen: a warlock floating in the air in the distance, lifting giant blocks and slabs of stone out of the ground to form a structure. From an Ethshar novel, by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

Edit: I still haven't read The Summer Palace (2008). The Ninth Talisman (2007) ended with the main characters in a desperate situation.

I got distracted by lions

Poll, that I didn't even write down in a notes file but am just typing directly here:

"Should people be concerned or upset if a situation seems to harm stupid people, like if they can't get jobs?"

Yes

I'm not sure

No

This is, basically, an indirect test for awareness of the hidden problem.

I would say the answer is yes, and yet I may have acted like other people would not answer yes.

It is not really fair to just state that "stupid people create problems". If you believe in evolution, two million years ago we were all only as smart as other monkeys. Everyone was stupid, and we became better; societies became more successful than other societies, and stupid people also played a big role in that success.

But because of the hidden problem, people gain more awareness of the potential for stupid people to cause outcomes that other people may regard as very harmful, even if they may not be willing to admit it; and so people can come to view stupid people as their enemies, which is not at all helped by stupid people using bad words and acting like other people are their enemies. But it's hard to blame them, because if it's a war, who can ever say who started the war?

(When I talked about Jewish people a few posts back, it made me think afterwards about apples and my animal name given to me by my oldest sister, which I'm not sure if I've mentioned on this site. I still think that it's about awareness of the hidden problem; not that "knowledge" is "knowledge of the hidden problem", but that degraded and unreliable signal accuracy can only affect cultures that have come to believe in knowledge, as useful information that can be communicated to others. A war can only exist if people know it exists, and this is early evidence.)

Anyway: it's better to avoid fighting. People don't like to admit to being stupid, and it's often considered an insult, but people who are stupid would prefer if other people saw them in a friendly way, rather than as an enemy. A lot of people don't want help or even sympathy, because people can use helping someone at one moment in time as an excuse not to help them in the future, but giving someone a job where they provide the same value as other workers is not providing them with special privileges. (Noting that people with physical disabilities like blindness also often want to find paid work. In my second job, as a dishwasher, there was a cook who sometimes had seizures that interrupted his work; he did not want to lose the job, but he did.)

To be honest I may have forgotten why I made this post, and before I try to remember, Knowledge: role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons often have two statistics related to thought. In D&D, they are Wisdom (sought by clerics, who gain their power from deities, and apparently also by psionicists) and Intelligence (sought by wizards, who gain their power from raw magical potential in the world). In World of Warcraft, they are Spirit and Intellect, which were apparently intended to have a similar RPG flavor, with the first sought by healers and the second sought by mages.

There was an explanation that I remember, of the difference: "Intelligence is knowing that it will rain. Wisdom is knowing you should get out of the rain." I don't know if that's a good or accurate explanation. I think that maybe wisdom could be better contrasted with knowledge, which is not the same as intelligence: the idea here being that signal accuracy becomes more important, and its effects including decreased fitness for intelligent individuals are more prominent, in larger communities, where everyone does not already know everyone else.

Wisdom is a word that is (at least in the culture that I know, having been born at a certain time, and not necessarily familiar with how the word was used 200 years ago) associated with old people. Old people being more wise does not necessarily mean they are more knowledgeable than someone who is 20~30 years old and like been picking herbs for 20 of those years. This is the knowledge distinction: knowledge is useful information that can be communicated, or maybe replicated. Wisdom, then, is maybe decisions that are reached, possibly from information that would not be seem 'useful' enough to be classified as knowledge: the memory that someone had a certain facial expression before or after certain events, from which could be inferred their emotional state and values, even if neither the exact expression nor the inferred information can be communicated to other people or written in a book as reliable information.

So in a sense, wisdom would have predated knowledge. A lion might be wise, or maybe people are just impressed by lions sleeping all day and conserving their movement. It would be much easier to conclude from a lion's behavior that he is wise, than that he has any knowledge beyond awareness of the things that an observer could also see (or hear, or smell).

Almost been an hour since I started writing this, so if I have forgotten its purpose, not entirely surprising. Now it has been an hour.

If you read this post, please tell me if this seems like a useful poll. Of course I don't expect anyone to respond, and if they did it would be a trap since they would be acknowledging awareness of this idea and creating a moral dilemma for themselves.

Encouraging people to work less in a way that benefits society

Some people might not understand the need for the last part of this phrase: "in a way that benefits society." There are ways of encouraging people to work less that do not benefit society, which is a detail which is sometimes lost in questions like "does it help poor people when rich people work less?"

First: can it be helpful to society at all if people work less? Biggest reason to think the answer is no is war. Iran was just fighting the US and Israel. The fighting stopped; a day ago, US President Trump posted a promotional picture for a fighting match between two people. Is this relevant? Question: does it matter if the world thinks Iran won the fighting against the US, which Iran's leadership council said is not over? (Israel also played a role of course, but the US spends much more on military than Israel, and it's likely that the US sank the majority of Iranian naval vessels etc. Basically all I know is that Trump mentioned an island, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Iran uses it to export oil, and the article mentioned strikes by the US on the island; not strikes by Israel. The US has aircraft carriers, Israel doesn't.)

If it does matter whether the world thinks the US lost the war, presumably by being overwhelmed by cheap drones, then the war is like the martial arts match, which is held to determine a winner, I think (I have no interest in watching people hit each other and so I can't say whether people care more about the action than the results).

So: other possibilities in which people work less, and why they would not benefit society. (These are basically ways that other people have thought of, without thinking of this idea.)

Possibility: there is no unemployment. Actually making a plausible scenario for this condition is hard. Suppose a rule, "rich people must spend as much money per year as they earn, or they will be executed." Not realistic because in reality, people like to save money during part of their lives, then spend it when they get older. People also like to give money to their children. So, are rich young heirs forced to work, so that there is no unemployment? In general, an economy is likely not to be perfectly balanced so that there is absolutely no change in any macroeconomic indicators, like percent of wealth held by the top 10%, from one year to the next. If wealth is increasing, then even if there is no unemployment at one point in time, it would arise in the future, if a scenario is simulated for thousands of years.

We just ignore that and say that there is no unemployment. If there IS unemployment, then if people work less, then it allows other people to work, which reduces unemployment, which drives up wages. This is basically the case no matter what the details are regarding people working less. So it becomes harder to show that people working less in this situation helps society. If any methods show benefit under this condition of no unemployment, they will show a larger benefit if there is unemployment.

Possibility: welfare. People quitting work and just collecting welfare, paid for by rich members of society. By many metrics, society would be improved by this: if you exclude the people who are deliberately not working and who are collecting welfare, then more people can find jobs, because someone has to create the value which is consumed by the people on welfare. But on a fairness metric, this is worse: it does not benefit society. Someone who doesn't care about fairness, or who believes in an ancestral debt that can only be paid off by welfare, might disagree and say that it does benefit society.

Possibility: people who value their time highly, and value more money lowly, make a sacrifice in working less time. Example: someone who works 60 hours per week and makes $2 million per year reduces their work load to just 40 hours per week and makes $1 million per year. They have to work 33% more to make $1. Maybe this increases the time they spend with their children from 1 hour per week to 10 hours per week, a 900% increase, and they feel it's worth it. But it doesn't benefit society for them to do this. Natural assumption is that if they are working 67% of the hours, they are still providing 67% of the value to their company. Informed conclusion is that they are still providing even more than 67% of the value, since people are less efficient when they work more, though the actual relationship between time worked and efficiency while working probably has a peak (like with the model of, 'efficiency is quadratic due to a split between information gathering and decision making, with the value of decisions being directly proportional to the information gathered').

So if they are providing 67% of value, while earning only 50%, then the company is earning more. Even if they're making $1 million per year, most stocks are held by rich people, and it's reasonable to say the higher profits for the company go to rich people. Result: higher inequality. If rich people have more, then poor people have less; if everyone has more money it's just called inflation. This first-order effect is bad for society, and the second-order effect of "creating a pattern for other people to follow" is also bad for society. If one worker is willing to sacrifice and work more for lower wages, then companies will expect other workers to do the same.

Possibility: no sacrifice, people just work less with a proportional reduction in wages. The $2 million per year worker goes to $1.33 million when they reduce their hours per week from 60 to 40. In reality, people tend to work based on how they are paid, with exceptions for stupid people who don't realize when they're being paid more than other people who are doing the same amount of work.

So if the worker is being paid 67% as much, then they will only try to do 67% of the original work. They might 'accidentally' do more, just as when they are only getting paid 50% as much (and still looking at being granted the option of doing this as a favor from the company), but they won't feel an obligation to do so.

As the middle option, that seems like it's being fair to all involved, it can be hard to see why this is bad for society. It's basically only bad because it's not stable. There is nothing that makes it particularly attractive, either for the company or the worker, and so not many people would do it. All it really does is exist as what seems like an acceptable solution, which prevents people from looking for a better solution. If unemployment exists, then people working less in this way does reduce unemployment, but people often talk about things like the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, which is basically an excuse to ignore all the young people who can't find jobs despite a low birth rate: an excuse because inflation can't happen, or eventually ends, without the first step of printing money. So if people don't see reducing unemployment beyond a certain point as important, then the benefits to society from people working less in this way cease.

Possibility: people work less but are paid the same amount. Workers say they want this but it provides no benefit to a business. Like with welfare, it's a solution that involves conflict: one side benefits, while another side receives net harm (as opposed to just a smaller benefit). Conflict rarely generates solutions better than the best possible solution that doesn't involve conflict.

Possibility: instead of getting people to work less, businesses find ways to get people to work more. This increases unemployment and also increases inequality, because people won't demand wage increases in proportion to the amount of work they do.

The final possibility is this idea. If we use the same terms as before, businesses are making a sacrifice: the $2 million per year worker goes from 60 to 40 hours per week, and is paid $1.5 million, rather than $1 million (worker sacrifices) or $1.33 million (proportional reduction). The potential for this to benefit society, ignoring the effects that the worse possibilities mentioned above can also provide (like lower unemployment), is rooted in people working harder because they are being paid at a higher rate; or alternatively, people working harder because if they complete tasks sooner, they have more free time. Businesses benefit if people work harder, and have the option of preventing people from working less in this way if the promised efficiency gains don't materialize (including by truthful indications to workers that the business will shut down due to unprofitability if workers don't provide enough value to the company). Businesses also have a safety mechanism if giving workers more freedom to decide when tasks are done leads to people doing a worse job on tasks by spending less time on them (i.e. dishonesty): people who finish tasks earlier so they can leave work will be paid less.

Game theory revealing preferences

'Sarina Paris 01. Look At Us (Lyrics) [jSJTzfLy60s]_cropped.webm' (different version)
133 BPM, interval 3.6090225564, beat 1.94

'Look At Us Now Baby-lyrics [4om_eQ42mT4].webm'
138.067 or 138.03 BPM, beat 1.6

'Look At Us Now - Sarina Paris [z3.fm 36664329].opus'
138 BPM, beat 1.51
Audacity shows 0.0997 difference at start, reduced to 0.0476 around 9.45, with no change to end. 0.04 BPM difference over ~183 sec.

I named my newest SSD Orchid, after deleting the Ubuntu partition that I installed but never used. So I will use Orchid as the example name here, instead of "Person 1" or looking up a name from Wikipedia's lists of popular baby names, like I did with the first public argument. (Using this SSD for data means that I have no backup plan if my 17-year-old hard drive fails.)

Making up numbers instead of using a bunch of confusing variables, Orchid can take action to accomplish goal X. The difficulty of her accomplishing it is 10. The benefit to her of goal X being accomplished is not known to us, but we are trying to estimate it.

If Orchid was the only person (?) who could accomplish goal X, and she knew how difficult it was, then our task would be easy: if she tries to do it, then her benefit is 10 or more. If she doesn't try, then her benefit is less than 10.

What if other people can also do X? Let's say that X is repairing a damaged railing (??). Orchid's net benefit is her effort subtracted from her valuation of X. If her valuation is 12, and difficulty is 10, then she gains 2 if she does it herself, but 12 if someone else does it.

Suppose that I cannot do X myself. I can only pester other people until they do it. Different people have different difficulties. Suppose one person's difficulty is 50. Trying to exactly calculate things gets complicated here, but clearly some people would not want to do X without being pestered by me.

Another person's difficulty is just 10, same as for Orchid. We will call this person Jieli. Some possibilities:

1) Orchid has a 100% chance to value X.

2) There is only a 50% chance that Orchid values X.

If Orchid values X, we are assigning the arbitrary valuation of 12. If possibility 1 is true, then the expected gain for Orchid from goal X being completed is 12, while the cost to Jieli is 10. Net benefit for the whole system is +2.

If possibility 2 is true, then the expected gain for Orchid is only 6: 50% chance of 12, and 50% chance of 0. The cost to Jieli remains 10, so the expected net benefit for the whole system is -4 (a loss).

We don't know which possibility is true. But if possibility 2 is true, then I should not pester Jieli to do X, because it would be a net loss.

Some people who don't care about Jieli's wasted effort might still pester her, if they only care about gains for Orchid. Other people would not.

Orchid has the ability to reveal whether possibility 1 or possibility 2 is true. Orchid can also complete goal X herself, with difficulty 10. If Orchid does neither of these things, then it becomes more reasonable to assume that possibility 2 is true. In this way, uncertainty sort of resolves itself through people's inactions to reveal their preferences. But it only makes sense if Orchid understands that I value Jieli's effort. If people do not share the same goals of attaining the maximum benefit for the overall system, as an optimization problem, then there could be miscommunications about why action is not being taken.

Real world example: how often to take out the trash? https://youtu.be/3nllrCss2CU?t=43

If it would be easy for someone to get other people to use the idea and they don't do it, then I assume they don't want me to pester other people who would have much more difficulty convincing people to use it.

Pretending that the president of the United States will read this

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116382212683078684

Didn't understand this. A search didn't give a helpful AI summary, which meant I had to actually read articles. This has a user poll, but after I voted and tried to give a fake email address, the results did not appear as promised

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/what-is-ranked-choice-voting-trump-calls-it-fraudulent-after-democrat-barbara-lee-becomes-oakland-mayor/articleshow/120447022.cms

My system resources when I tried to use a browser that is not 4 years old to click the Continue button, with no better results; green is memory, purple is swap space usage, dark orange is disk reading while bright orange is disk writing (to swap space), 40 pixels = 400 sec:

Just an example of herd-like behavior: everyone has better computers, so resources used by software expands to match, even when the software is used on old computers that have not gotten any better. Just like rent increasing with higher incomes.

From the same site: 

“We’ve had 15 to 20 (deminers) lose limbs, and around a dozen of our brothers were killed doing this job.”

A prosthetic limb costs over $3,000, far beyond the means of most survivors.

Background article about ranked voting being good:

https://fairvote.org/americans-think-democracy-isnt-working-ranked-choice-voting-can-help/

Only 19% of people in the US think that the US's democracy is a good example for other countries to follow. From article, "It’s no wonder young voters are among the strongest supporters of RCV."

So why would someone think it's bad? Answer:

https://theconversation.com/ranked-choice-voting-outperforms-the-winner-take-all-system-used-to-elect-nearly-every-us-politician-267515

Which links to, https://electionscience.org/research-hub/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat

Instead, Palin voters got their worst outcome because they honestly ranked Palin first.

Assumption behind the argument is that the center candidate not winning is bad, and a critique of ranked-choice voting.

But what it really is, is defining the center candidate as conservative. The problem that people see is not that the center candidate didn't win; it's that someone whom they define as conservative didn't win.

If the goalpost for 'conservative' was changed, without any of the views of the candidates themselves being changed, then the center candidate could be defined as liberal, and the election is about one liberal candidate winning instead of a more central liberal candidate winning.

 

Should a center candidate always win? They don't in what the first of the above two articles calls plurality voting. The second article says this,

Just go ahead and hold onto those RCV claims. Here they are for reference:

    You can always support your favorite without worry

    Your second choice will come into play if your first choice can’t win

    The winner will always get a majority

(Spoiler: none of these are true. Read on to see why.)

The critique of the third point is that some ballots did not list more than one candidate. But plurality voting also doesn't require that the winner gets a majority; that's why it's called plurality: "A number of votes for a single candidate or position which is greater than the number of votes gained by any other single candidate or position voted for, but which is less than a majority of valid votes cast."

If everyone agreed with the middle candidate in that election being 'conservative', and everyone who voted him preferred that a conservative candidate win over a liberal candidate, then all the votes from the eliminated middle candidate would have swapped to the remaining conservative candidate and she would have won.

It's true that supporters of that candidate would have preferred that the central candidate win, rather than the liberal candidate. But supporters of the liberal candidate preferred that she win over the central candidate. Can't look at this and say it was a bad outcome, because some people didn't get what they wanted, when it was because other people did get what they wanted.

Anyway, the question: should electoral systems choose a middle candidate?

Don't think of it as a single, 1-dimensional spectrum, from left to right. There is at least one other dimension, of a candidate's perceived suitability for a position. This might be competence or just like physical appearance:

https://www.google.com/search?q=data+physically+attractive+candidate+wins

https://wol.iza.org/articles/how-do-candidates-looks-affect-their-election-chances/long

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268123004109

https://www.psypost.org/study-suggests-that-attractive-candidates-for-the-u-s-house-of-representatives-are-more-likely-to-win-votes/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12940

(I'm not bothering to read any of these, but my recollection is that it varies a bit between female and male candidates, don't remember why; maybe depends on political orientation of voters, like Republican voters prefer attractive female candidates more)

So, should a very unsuitable candidate who is on the middle of the political spectrum win an election, just because they're in the middle?

What if that Alaskan election had used plurality voting? With the same three candidates, we would probably have gotten the same result, with the liberal candidate winning: so Ranked Choice would not be a threat to democracy as it would not change the outcome. If one of the two candidates that people define as conservative had quit: if the middle candidate had quit, same outcome. If the conservative candidate had quit, the middle candidate would have won. But what would have caused one of those conservative candidates to quit?

Possibility: primaries that allow only one conservative candidate to be in the final election, so it ends up being one conservative and one liberal candidate. Unless liberal voters were participating in the primary election for conservatives (voting for the central candidate), and I don't think this is how it works, then the central candidate would have lost that primary, based on the data. Result: Ranked Choice is still not a threat to democracy.

The correct way to think of the consequences for 'dishonest' tactical voting here are not that conservative voters would have harmed the liberal candidate if they voted for her, instead of the conservative candidate: it's that they would have helped the central candidate by not voting for the conservative candidate. If they wanted this outcome, of helping the central candidate, they could rank the central candidate first and the conservative candidate second.

Assumptions behind the belief that it would be best if a central candidate should win an election: basically, people's beliefs about conflicts, and how elections are supposed to reveal the desires of the majority. Thinking that a compromise candidate will reduce conflict, even the reality could be that they will just produce outcomes that are equally far from what both sides want.

If, instead, one views the political process as a way of testing outcomes to see what works best, then more extreme outcomes provide better data. If central candidates always get elected and policy never changes, then there is no way to judge whether policy should move slightly in one direction vs another direction.

I still basically view it as irrelevant; that no political candidates are identifying the important problems. People look at elections and think that the outcomes must reflect the desires of the majority of people (weighted by money, and not necessarily the best for a country if the majority is basically choosing to 'defect' in a prisoner's dilemma with minority groups, i.e. net loss for the country despite the majority benefiting), but just because politicians have the job of finding a solution that people will like does not mean they'll be successful.

Example, from 2011 because I don't really care about anything that's happened in politics since then: when US Congress raised the debt ceiling and most people thought that they shouldn't because the US was poor. I think of the comments from Yahoo news articles about the raised debt limit that I didn't include in any arguments, where it was like 2000 upvotes saying that the government was corrupt and less than 10 downvotes, but there is at least the survey questions here:

One-Step Plan to Eliminating Unemployment

Second question, first option: "The federal government should spend money to create jobs, even if it means it has to borrow the money to do so". This includes both borrowing money to be able to spend it (with people believing that the money would be borrowed from China, but in actuality most debt was internal, owned by people or companies in the US like the companies with record profits or their shareholders), and also raising taxes and then spending that money, without more debt. So it can be inferred that (if people were consistent in their beliefs, which they aren't) the number of people who wanted more money to be borrowed was less than 42%.

Federal Debt: Total Public Debt was at $14.8 trillion in Q3 2011, and at $38.5 trillion in Q4 2025. Have the actions taken by politicians been in alignment with what's best for the public, or with what people want?

To Imane, pt 67

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116377422440266990

She didn't react to or anticipate the attack at all.

The platform definitely has some problems. Elements blanking when not in view, which on my old computer can make them take half a second or more to load, way beyond the threshold for irritation in UI responsiveness design. If there was a reason for a delay it might be acceptable, but there's no reason that scrolling up and down should make an element disappear (after scrolling up for 0.2 sec, and then back to the same place in 0.2 sec) and then reappear in the same place. When elements load, they can also shift slightly in place due to sub-elements loading. Overall, it just teaches a viewer that they can't look at things for about a second after scrolling, because the thing they are looking at could disappear or move, and it just adds up to many moments of annoyance.

But I can't even look at Chirp Club without using Nitter, and even with any platform improvements that may have taken place under Elon Musk, Chirp Club still takes many seconds for my browser to load the page for a single status, while Nitter is basically instant and works without Javascript.

Two separate things: convincing people that this idea would fix problems, and convincing them to share it or even to respond to me.

A few days ago, I was considering referencing Machiavelli's quote,

Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

I didn't, because it is not a complete explanation. People suggest many new things for WoW Classic Plus. Back in 2006~2010, a thread for appearance changing (maybe called "dressing room") that was eventually implemented as 'transmogrification' was always one of the most popular threads on the Suggestions forum. It was new and unproven, and yet people were not afraid to say they wanted it.

There's always a bias: new things that gain the support of most people get implemented. Then they are no longer new things. What remains are ideas that were conceived at the same time but did not win the same support. It is not correct to say that new things cannot and will not easily gain support.

Using a bit of the 'group identity' analysis from a few posts back, for this idea. People thinking,

1) This idea is about people working less.

2) Some people can afford to work less. Other people cannot.

3) When there is conflict and disagreement, people who support a thing are the ones who will benefit from it.

4) If I share this idea, it would indicate that I am in the group of people who can afford to work less. According to views on rich and poor, this group must be much smaller than the group who cannot afford to work less.

5) Even if people in the US make 10x or 20x as much as people in Nigeria, almost no one in the US can afford to work 1/10 of what they currently work. I am not willing to claim that I am in this situation myself.

Battle at Kruger:

4:11 "The lions have won"

4:23 zoom in on lions

4:30 zoom out to show buffalo herd approaching

4:39 lead buffalo pauses, then advances again

4:50 buffalos pause close to lions with herd reluctant to approach

4:58 buffalos on the left resume approaching the lions

Suppose this idea was implemented. If no one else has started working less, the ideal reduction for one person, balancing their time utility with their money utility, might be just 10%. But if 50% of people work less, then it reduces the cost of housing etc., and the ideal reduction for someone else who has not had any reduction might be 15%. Just like a herd approaching the lions, with no single buffalo getting far ahead of the rest of the herd.

10% might not seem like much. Maybe the ideal reduction would be even smaller, like 3%. But if 99% of people (selected at random) work 3% less, then the ideal reduction for the last 1% (including both rich and poor people) might be 6%, because housing costs have gone down by 3%.

Buffalos can communicate to each other to some degree, such as through their movements. But humans can agree on a direction to move even if no one has yet started to move in that direction.

(My spellcheck says 'buffalos' is an error, and I would naturally have used buffalo as the plural, like sheep or deer, but a speaker in the video said buffalos and so I followed that.)

 

Unrelated poll that I thought of six hours ago:

Poll: "If you do X, most people will think you're smart, but very smart people will think you're stupid. Do you do X?"

Since Pey's video from her birthday will be deleted in about 24 hours, I have to watch it now. This is time when I'm not thinking about or doing anything with this idea. I assume that it's fine for me to spend this time, and if I can spend a few hours not focused on this idea, I can spend a longer time, so I intend to not say anything to you for two weeks, no matter what Greta might post on Instagram. If it turns out during this time that this decision was bad, then I will know that people did not plan ahead for me watching Pey's video.

To Imane, pt 66

From the end of the draft post, 'To Imane, pt 60', which seems like it will not be published before people use this idea:

Should Jewish people in Israel have more babies than they are currently having?

There's no reason for conflict if people have the same goals. But do people have the same goals? Decline in intelligence. I think that it's important that humans remain intelligent. There's no inherent reason to want this, and maybe not all people care about this outcome. But I think Jewish people want this. Without really knowing much about Jewish culture, I know that there are certain groups of people who call themselves Jewish who score higher on tests than other people, and that Jewish people often encourage each other (like their children) to marry other Jewish people, and I think one reason for this is to preserve a culture where intelligence is valued.

By not sharing this idea, other people are not acting like they think it's important to preserve human intelligence.

The world is in a bit of a weird place right now, with fossil fuels. It makes things easy and allows people to do stuff for weird reasons: things like fighting using those fossil fuels instead of needing to use horses like in WWI (*and WWII), or mining cryptocurrencies.

The theory behind this idea could be summarized as, "It's ok to be selfish, because people seeking their own self-interest still leads to good outcomes for the group." What if it doesn't? What if a group of people being selfish doesn't lead to good outcomes for the rest of the world? This is the test. Can Jewish people be selfish, without the dishonesty of claiming that they actually care about other groups of people in the world in cases where it isn't true?

The Beirut explosion: Jewish people being seen as bad, even when they didn't do anything bad. Why bother to be good when it isn't rewarding? And if you aren't good, why bother to try to convince other people that you're good?

So I have basically said, "be selfish". This is the phase that started with "Why economists are wrong" and was confirmed by the failure of the first petition, ~8 months later. Right now, the way for Jewish people to be selfish is to avoid doing anything that could be seen as selfish, even with perfect information: forcing the most religious Jewish people in Israel to be drafted into the military, even though those people were keeping up the birthrate of the Jewish subset of Israel. Looking like the villains.

If the way for Israel to be selfish is to avoid sharing the idea or doing anything that would get other people to use it, and to bomb Lebanon and Palestine or even to act peacefully towards them (like by paying Palestinians to move to another country, the way Russia paid Ukrainians to move to a distant part of Russia), I'm not trying to discourage Israel from taking that course of action. Maybe other cultures that are not Israel simply do not value human intelligence enough to support a course of action that would preserve it.

I don't think I could live in the world that would result. For one thing, I am not Jewish, and I have no desire to become Jewish. But I cannot deny that I have failed, and that it might be selfish for me to even still be alive. The original deadline was supposed to be when my passport expired, as my last form of official ID, which happened on 21 Sep 2019. I apologize to the people who were on MH370 for missing this deadline.

To Imane, pt 65

Greta mentioned Lebanon, without any possible interpretation that it was about refugees or about journalists being targeted, and I had to look up what exactly I said the consequences would be if she did that.

23 Mar 2026
"if Greta posts another image on Instagram about Lebanon without sharing the idea, it means that if Maya is interested in me, then I'm not interested in Greta"

This was partly just a reason to mention Maya. She deleted her account maybe a year after the Beirut explosion, which I treated as unimportant, and so today I finally watched footage of the explosion.

The condensation shockwave was weird at the start. In the first few frames, it's visible at the bottom, but not at the top. I ended up looking up footage of other explosions, like Sailor Hat and Minor Scale (intentional detonations with a high probability of good footage), to see if there was a similar shockwave and how it looked.

I was wondering if there were like multiple detonations. But after a bit of thinking, I understand why: above the explosion, where the fireball had passed a fraction of a second before, the air was hot. That means that the shockwave didn't form condensation, just like mist or clouds evaporating in hot air.

While looking up Minor Scale, someone in the comments suggested that Flock of Seagulls, I Ran would be a good song to match to the silent test footage. While I was playing that in one tab while also trying to watch a video about the Beirut explosion in another tab, my browser experienced a bug where a content process causes 100% CPU and the tab doesn't change visually until I manually kill the process. If this bug is caused by an outside agency interfering by sending data that causes the bug, then it could be an indication that Mei is involved with a conspiracy and that she recognized the song, which was featured in World First -- Stars vs yogg saron Alone in the Darkness 25man.

I sent a link to Mei in 2009 (the original video and kill was in June 2009); she said she had seen the footage of the fight enough times and didn't watch the whole video. But maybe she did.

My file, 'online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt' has a note on 24 Jan 2025: "comment https://genius.com/Kamelot-center-of-the-universe-lyrics"

The people who made annotations there just made the song to be about the overall frame story for the album. But, "in the center of the universe, we are all alone". In the center: not trying to hide. All alone: despite not trying to hide, no one else is affected by your actions, for good or for bad. Just do what you want.

Four days ago: @_iris._13 beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ, jump spin with sync tuning, from https://www.tiktok.com/@_iris._13/video/7158878639105363205 (private).

 in='/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/@_iris._13 beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  [7158878639105363205].mp4'

 fd="-framedrop -vf drawtext=fontcolor=white:fontsize=10+H/50:x=W-200*(10+H/50)/24:y=10:shadowx=2:shadowy=2:text='%{pict_type} %{pts}':fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf -vf copy -af asetpts=PTS-0/TB -v quiet -seek_interval 2.5" s1="-seek_interval 1" l="$fd -loop 0"

Quick sync test:
 async=+0.0 vol=0dB gain= vsync=0 extra="" note="[a ${async}s]" exp="TS+$vsync/TB"; [ "$old" = "$in" ] || { ffmpeg -i "$in" -t 10 $sd; old="$in" ; } ; ffplay "$in" ${fd/-0\/TB/$async/TB-$vsync/TB,volume=$vol} -window_title "$async -$vsync ${in/*\//[...]/}" -loop 0 && read && end=${in##*]} out=${in/%$end/$note$end} out=${out/ [/$extra [} ext=${end##*.} d=/dev/shm && ffmpeg -itsoffset $async -i "$in" -copyts -c copy -y -vn $d/acopy.$ext && ffmpeg -i "$in" -i $d/acopy.$ext -time_base:v 1/30k -bsf:v "setts='pts=$exp:dts=$exp'" -copyts -c copy ${gain:+-bsf:a opus_metadata=gain=}$gain -map 0:v -map 1:a -movflags faststart -map_metadata 0 $d/copy.$ext && ffplay $l $d/copy.$ext && touch -r "$in" $d/copy.$ext && mv -iv $d/copy.$ext "$out.temp" && sync "$out.temp" && mv -iv "$out.temp" "$out" && rm -iv "$in" #audio sync with Opus input

 extra=", jump spin" exp="TS+0.08/TB-0.07/TB*clip((TS*TB-0.9)/1.3,0,1)-0.04/TB*clip((TS*TB-2.2)/1.1,0,1)-0.09/TB*clip((TS*TB-3.3)/1.5,0,1)+0.09/TB*clip((TS*TB-5.6)/0.8,0,1)-0.05/TB*clip((TS*TB-6.6)/0.7,0,1)-0.05/TB*clip((TS*TB-7.3)/2,0,1)" end="${in##*]}" out=${in/$end/[sync tuning]$end} out=${out/ [/$extra [} d=/dev/shm ext=${end##*.}; ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -itsoffset 0.08 -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -c copy -map 0:v -map 1:a -time_base 1/30k -bsf:v "setts='pts=$exp:dts=$exp'" $d/temp.$ext; ffplay $d/temp.$ext $fd $s1

 ffmpeg -i $d/temp.$ext -i $d/temp.$ext -c copy -copyts -map 0:v -map 1:a -max_interleave_delta 0 $d/copy.$ext && touch -r "$in" $d/copy.$ext && mv -iv $d/copy.$ext "$out.temp" && sync "$out.temp" && mv -iv "$out.temp" "$out" && rm -iv "$in"

Note: anyone performing this dance, DO NOT PREVENT THE PERSON'S LEG FROM ROTATING WHEN THEY SPIN. The left dancer's hand goes from under the leg, to above the leg, so the foot doesn't get twisted. One of these is probably someone failing to correctly do that, with serious results:

'@annikenholmen04 + @_eldrid_ beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ [7158396222615719174].mp4'
'@futuremilfho3 beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fail [7162732051274222891].mp4'
'@glowingfrogturds beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fall [7161954637589974318].mp4'
'@heheheh331 beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fail [7161927723965943086].mp4'
'@leigh.munro beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ [7160864979871108398].mp4'
'@userb93051h8fu beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fail [7159517031245630726].mp4'

After the Beirut explosion, some people suspected it of being caused by Israel. But it wasn't.

"I can't believe a problem like this would happen" is exactly the kind of outcome that would be prevented with better signals. In one of my emails to Elyse before I joined the US military, I asked her, "what is an emergency?" A word that every English speaker knows. But why is it so similar to the word 'emerge'?